Tag: immigration

The International Fresh Produce Association, the largest and most diverse international association serving the entire global fresh produce and floral supply chain took the stage at the National Immigration Forum’s 2022 Leading the Way Conference in Washington, D.C., today to elevate immigration as a pillar of agricultural and economic prosperity.  

I am deliberately writing this on the day of the election. So nothing I say can be taken as reflecting on what did and didn’t or should have or shouldn’t have happened in the mid-term election.

We remain stuck on reform yet again, with a solution looking further away than ever.

It’s been attempted for decades, but the International Fresh Produce Association’s government relations group is cautiously optimistic for a bipartisan solution to the immigration crisis with relations to agriculture.

International Fresh Produce Association members spearheaded a press conference today along with other members of the Alliance for a New Immigration Consensus (ANIC) calling for urgent Senate action on immigration reform.

Yet again, agricultural leaders are calling upon Congress to adopt some version of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which passed twice in the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, but which the Senate has so far failed to act on.

To judge from the news accounts, the July 12 meeting between President Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO for short) in Washington was a low-key, not to say perfunctory, affair.

Today national and state agricultural leaders joined Republican Members of Congress – including U.S. Representatives Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Jim Baird (R-IN), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) and Mike Simpson (R-ID) – to call on Congress to pass bipartisan workforce solutions to address the farm labor shortage in order to combat inflation.

Legislative apathy toward immigrant labor reform—a rare but unfortunate instance of bipartisan consensus—shows no current signs of improvement. The human cost of this neglect became grimly clear on June 27.

As part of its strategic commitment to government advocacy and leadership, the International Fresh Produce Association has played a key role in the creation of The Alliance for New Immigration Consensus, a diverse coalition representing the broad business community and focused on addressing workforce reforms and needs that are critical and essential to our nation’s economy.